Monthly Archives: February 2012

Don’t get me wrong–I don’t understand the idea of wanting to be president at all. It’s tons of work, there’s never really a fucking second when you’re NOT on the job, at least a hundred million people who you’re technically supposed to represent are going to hate every fucking thing you do, and there’s the possibility that you’ll be the person responsible for incinerating half the people on the globe at any given moment. So, yeah–shitty, shitty job.

But back to Romney. Of all the fuckers in my life who have run for president, I understand him least of all.

He’s got all the charisma of a comatose iguana, and he’s trying to be a politician. But there he is, trying like hell to get elected to the highest office in the land.

And the hell of it is, the guy’s got, like, a quarter of a BILLION fucking dollars, and he’s been running for president non-stop for the last ten years. President of the United States is one of the least fucking desirable jobs in the entire world (see above), and he’s been after it for a decade.

Dude. Take a fucking vacation.

TAKE ALL THE VACATIONS.

Why tool around in places like fucking Kansas, or Georgia, or fucking Ohio in a goddamn bus, eating at every shithole diner you come across, smiling while you choke down the greasy food and shitty coffee, pretending to like the yokels you so clearly despise, when you could be kickin’ it in the south of France, or Hawaii, or somewhere in fucking French Polynesia?

Man, you have options: Eat all the best food, enjoy the gorgeous vistas, have a personal ball-shaver, play real-life first-person shooter games where no one can shoot back if you want.

I mean, you give me $250 million bucks? I’m gonna go to work for exactly one week longer, but I’m gonna ride a fat man all the way there and tie him up to the bike rack outside like it’s a fucking old-West hitching post. Why one more week of work? Because that’s how long it would take me to literally shit on the desks of everyone who’s pissed me off.

With a quarter of a billion dollars, I’d do shit just because I could.

I’d stomp the shit out of some Bluetooth-wearing asshole who wouldn’t shut up when he’s walking behind me on the street, and when the cops showed up, I’d pay them to taser him until his ballsack EXPLODED.

Why in the fuck would I subject myself to the never-ending hell that is the American Presidential campaign? Jesus, I’d fucking pull out a gun and shoot myself if I had to share a stage with Bachmann, Perry, Gingrich, and Santorum EVEN ONCE.

I’d go to exactly one of those debates, but I’d have a hot firefighter guy and Zooey Deschanel trading off on tonguing my dong the whole time. Naturally, they’d be paid extremely well for their labor.

That’s the only way I would be able to keep from shooting myself. Christ. Can you imagine having to pretend to “debate” Rick Fucking Santorum? That’s a guy who thinks that fuckingbirth control should be illegal. We settled that fucking shit FIFTY FUCKING YEARS AGO. And just because he’s never gotten a proper blowjob in the intervening years, we have to act like this is a fucking issue again? WHAT THE FUCKING FUCK?

I swear to god, I’d just rip off a huge fucking bong hit right there on national TV, anddareRon Paul to join me.

Then I’d go punch Santorum in the dick until his asshole collapsed, because, seriously, fuck that guy.

And what would anyone do? I’D HAVE A QUARTER OF A BILLION FUCKING DOLLARS. RULES DO NOT APPLY ANYMORE. Why would I be participating in that fucking farce, unless it was just to show people that I could fuck with them?

And then there’s fucking Newt Fucking Gingrich. One of the most colossal assholes that the American political system has ever produced, and that is a pretty fucking high bar to set.

Here’s what I’d do to that asshole: I’d just go stand beside Gingrich, work up a big hocker, and spit it right in his stupid fucking fat face. And I’d tell him that I’d have his whole family killed if he eventhought about wiping it off before the “debate” was over.

Of course, this being Gingrich, he’d probably see it as a hassle-free way to get rid of his family, and commence enthusiastically cleaning his face with his little rat claws.

The point is: Dude’s got more money than god. Go build a gold-plated helicopter that runs on dodo blood and atheist tears, and fly around dropping the Book of Mormon on “Gentiles” or something. Do some shit that you fucking ENJOY. For god’s sakes, fuckface, you’ve lived your whole life insulated from 99.99% of the rest of us. Go on and spend the rest of it the same way. You’re only making yourself and the rest of us miserable with what you’re doing now.

Looking closer, you might guess, correctly, that it was taken on a Sunday. For the record, it was an Easter Sunday. Also for the record, I believe it may be the only (and last) photo ever taken of me carrying a purse.

But if you’re from Texas, you see more. Almost certainly, in at least one of the springtimes of your childhood, you too were situated, possibly against your will or better judgement, in a field ofLupinus texensis so your parents, aunts, uncles, and/or Meemaws could snap your picture.

Transcending boundaries of class, gender, race, ethnicity, geography, and photographic abilities, tens of thousands of bluebonnet pictures have been taken of tens of thousands of children. As well as not a few adults, dogs, new pickups, and other objects of affection. That’s just how we do down here.

But here’s the deal: more than the bluebonnets (which, by the way, were more likelyLupinus subcarnosus, the sand-loving cousins oftexensis), more than the Easter dresses, more than any actual reason that led to the picture being taken, it’s the incidentals that give it power.

That little goober in the red didn’t know this location but the kid she would be and that I used to be knew every inch of it by heart. It wasn’t my backyard or an actual playground but it might as well as been. “Going down to the bay” was how most of my wandering kid adventures started out. The best ones, anyway.

I look at this and I’m standing on the very spot where it was taken, I know the stray cats living under those exact salt cedars covered with wild mustang vines. Even over the pushy prevailing wind from the southeast, I can hear the noise from the mobs of courting Least Terns that have turned the little spit of an island in the background into their rookery. The wind, the salt in the air, grassburs and sand in my socks, the oyster shell road we’re standing next to, the sense memory of all of it comes in waves. Not imagined or blurred nostalgia, but involuntary and absolute experience. Time travel, or as close as I’ve gotten to it.

Everybody has at least one old Polaroid or some other momento like that, don’t they?

My daughter’s fourth-grade teacher is unmarried and pregnant. Although she is a fantastic educator, kids at that age are bound to ask questions and are old enough that you cannot placate them with a simple answer. I asked her teacher what she told the children about her condition. She told me that she informed them she was pregnant (she is due in June, so this was obvious) and that was it. I asked her if she planned to keep the baby. She told me that was her business alone and she is not obligated to explain her marital status or plans with her child to me or anybody else. I feel that this woman has significant exposure and influence over my child and my questions were perfectly acceptable. Should I take this to the principal or switch classrooms? My husband thinks we should drop it, but I don’t want my daughter to get the impression that single motherhood is acceptable.

Prudence rightly tells this crazy nosy skank to fuck right the fuck off, but she comes right back:

I am having a hard time just “dropping” this. My daughter loves her teacher and is with her for a considerable amount of her day. Her teacher is somebody she looks up to, and now I am afraid my daughter is getting a bad example. I always plan to treat her teacher with respect, but that does not mean her condition does not have consequences at her job—which is influencing young minds!

You know what, for serious find something to DO. I am not an inordinately active person but I swear to God right now, whenever somebody tells me something you know what my first reaction is? These days? It’s “Do I need to be here for this meeting? Like, do you need me to do anything about whatever it is?” Okay, then. If something is not actually on fire, or someone else is already engaged in putting the fire out, my primary reaction is relief. Goody, I get to watch some TV or take a bath. Make myself some cinnamon rolls. Have you ever made cinnamon rolls from scratch? It’s so easy and they taste incredible.

What I mean is, how on earth do you have time to skulk around worrying and worrying about how your kid feels about her knocked up teacher? Don’t you have work or volunteering or books to read or Netflix or something? Don’t you have a kid to take care of? Doesn’t your bathroom floor ALWAYS need cleaning? I clean mine like every two days and I don’t understand it, the ferrets aren’t even IN there, how do dust bunnies get fucking everywhere? Aren’t there museums to visit or baseball games where you are, crazyface? Is this really the biggest thing you have going on? Call your friends, go see a movie. Play some chess. Eat an apple.

I’ve talked before about how we seem incapable of looking at people who are living lives we wouldn’t live and just shrugging, and this is exactly it.

It was fun while it lasted: the fleeting notion of Democrats crossing over to vote for Santorum. Some did but not enough to beat Mittbot. I talked to a customer from Ann Arbor who early voted for Senator Sweater Vest because he wanted to “fuck up the Romney bandwagon.” It’s not much of a bandwagon for a man with a Cadillac at every McMansion.

On to the post title. I’ve been trying to bestow an ecclesiastical title on Santorum for quite some time and decided that an arch-conservative should be an Archbishop. It’s hard to imagine the Pope or a Cardinal in a sweater vest, after all…

Santorum may be a raving lunatic and religious fanatic but he has a pulse. The pundits keep telling us that Romney has show more humanity but there’s no there there. He is who he is and unlike Archbishop Santorum, he’s not Opus to Dei for…

Now that I’ve used (misused?) that horrid pun, I shall retire for the night…

“Senator, you know, wait a minute,” Gregory interrupted. “You talk about this stuff every week. And by the way, it’s not just in this campaign. Sir in this campaign, you talk about it, and I’ve gone back years when you’ve been in public life and you have made this a centerpiece of your public life. So the notion that these are not deeply held views worthy of question and scrutiny – it’s not just about the press.”

“Yeah, they are deeply held views, but they’re not what I dominantly talk about, David. You’re taking things that over a course of a 20-year career, and pulling out quotes from different speeches on issues that are fairly tangential, not what people care about mostly in America, and saying, ‘Oh, he wants to impose those values.’ Look at my record. I never wanted to impose any of the things that you just talked about.”

“There is no evidence at all that I want to impose those values on anybody else,” he added.

Last month, Santorum told CNN host Piers Morgan that he would as president outlaw gay marriage.

‏ @thepubliceditor:I applaud@CharlesMBlow for apologizing for his tweet on Romney. Criticism based on religion is inappropriate, on Twitter or anywhere else.

Blow really should have been reprimanded for not being able to come up with anything better than the magic underwear thing. You work at theTimes, man, put your shoulder into it! Have one of your interns look up something about Mormonism that all of Twitter hasn’t adequately addressed before now.

Unfunny schoolyard cracks that Conan O’Brien’s writers would have passed on are indeed inappropriate. However, criticism based on religion is most assuredly appropriate, at least, as appropriate as criticism based on anything else.

We can’t sit here and rule things out of bounds to talk about on the basis of somebody said the word “god” and now that means we all have to stop questioning. Faith is used too often as some kind of prophylacticagainst criticism in public life, an instant protection against having to explain one’s positions and justify one’s actions. “I believe” has come to mean “now you can’t object, because I invoked the Jesus Pokémon, regardless of what insane shit comes out of my mouth next.”

Which is a pity, because in the best traditions of faith doctrine can be the result of long periods of learned argument and study, and talking about one’s faith doesn’t have to be a threat to that faith. Sensible criticism about a politician’s faith would, one can hope, prompt a deeper explanation of how that faith informs a candidate’s actions.

In Romney’s case, that would mean exploring a candidate’s explicit view of his campaign as some kind of affirmation that AMERICA IS TEH AWESOMEST SEZ GOD and go fuck a French mime if you think differently. So I can see why his campaign wouldn’t exactly welcome that discussion.

ORANGEBURG, S.C. — Newt Gingrich on Friday backed at least a portion of the Dream Act, saying that he would grant a path to citizenship to illegal immigrant youths who agree to sign up and serve in the U.S. military. That’s a much tighter standard than the full Dream Act, which President Obama wants. That legislation would allow legal status and an eventual path to citizenship for children and young adults who join the military, but would also apply to those who go to college — a much broader class of people. “I am opposed to anybody who came here illegally getting citizenship. That’s entirely wrong,” the GOP presidential candidate and former House speaker told a young man who asked about illegal immigrant students. “The only exception I would make is if young people, the ones you are dealing with, are willing to join the American military and serve the United States.” Speaking a day before South Carolina’s GOP primary, Mr. Gingrich said that would put them on par with any other foreign-born legal resident who joins the U.S. military, and who under the law has a path to citizenship. Mr. Gingrich’s stance puts him in between Mr. Obama and GOP rival Mitt Romney, who has said he would veto the Dream Act.

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Remember the outrage on these boards when the Dems were pushing for passage of the DREAM Act?

6 posted on Friday, January 20, 2012 9:38:58 PM byHoodat (Because they do not change, Therefore they do not fear God. -Psalm 55:19-)

To: Hoodat

Newt lovers will disregard this just like global warming, lobbying freddie mac, the Newt leftist here on this board love him working goverment for 20 years then cashing in making 3-5 million a year, but romney can’t invest his own money open up a business and make a real honest living.Amazing group of leftist and hypocrites we now have here.

Support a serial adultererSupport a person who supports replacing Obamacare (said there were a good 300 pages of Obamacare)Endorsed a government mandate in healthcare in 1994 & 1995, and beyond.In 2003, Newt talked about how the government has to take the lead in regulatory control of healthcareIn 2005, he talks about redistribution of wealth to the poor to support healthcareHis healthcare thinktank has taken in $30 million from insurance companiesIn 2011, Newt opposed Paul Ryans medicare reform. Said it was too much radical reform.Newt claimed FDR was the greatest president of the 20th centurySupport a person who made a global warming ad with Pelosihttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VuBd1atfhQ4Supported Government subsidies for Ethanol to reduce GHG’sSaid he believed carbon emissions are going up in the atmosphereSupport a person who would have signed the dream actSupport a person who goes after capitalism (Bain)Only speaker sanctioned with Ethics issuesForced to resign from the house (400 members, including 100 republicans voted him out)Made $1.5m from lobbying Freddie and FannieWas critical of Bush’s anti-terror policiesOpposed the surge in Iraq These are just a few things I am aware of. And they are not conspiracies, lies or things taken out of context. Almost all the items above, you can find a video of Newt saying them in his own words. To me, it seems like Newt is flipping and flopping as much as Romney.

Wow, we have a once in a lifetime opportunity to elect a real conservative and it looks like we’re getting another hold your nose election. My sentiments exactly. And with McNewt as the nominee, we may actually lose.

42 posted on Friday, January 20, 2012 10:45:47 PM byHoodat (Because they do not change, Therefore they do not fear God. -Psalm 55:19-)

Hoodat has been posting since 2004.

This account has been banned or suspended.

.

LET THE PURGES COMMENCE ANEW!!

To: gswilder

And I saw a video of him last night talking about replacing Obamacare with another similar plan.

You’re finally getting Newt. He is a technocrat. Full of “ideas” but they all involve tinkering with Gov’t. He doesn’t really have the vision to return power to the power notwithstanding his “soaring” rhetoric. Newt is unsteady and will disappoint. Guaranteed.

the Newt leftist here on this board love him working goverment for 20 years then cashing in making 3-5 million a year, but romney can’t invest his own money open up a business and make a real honest living.

As someone who has called Romney some pretty vile names I have to wonder why this very important fact can’t even be discussed here. It seems all discussion of Romney is verbotten (sp)–he’s the enemy, and any DISCUSSION of who he is beyond anti-Mormon stuff is out of the question. I seem to recall a website where everyone heaped praise on Sarah Palin for starting a business and meeting a payroll. I seem to recall a website where Obama was bashed relentlessly for living only in the world of academia and government/’community leadership.’ I seem to recall a website where we wanted Washington insiders out, and people who were actual businessmen were in, and where capitalism was championed–real capitalism, not government payouts, but where failing companies were reorganized and all the realities (some not so comfortable) that entailed. I keep looking for that website, where having money wasn’t a crime particularly when the rich were giving much of their money to charity (in Romney’s case, this includes many non-Mormon causes). That same site praised Sarah Palin for her devotion to her husband and kids through good times and bad. Not sure what happened to that site. I keep finding this other one, where a serial philanderer and do-as-I-say, not-as-I-do Big Government guy who took money from the hated Fannie Mae when he wasn’t in government or teaching (not that there’s anything wrong with either, but one needs more varied experience) is being toasted as a conservative icon.

44 posted on Friday, January 20, 2012 10:49:56 PM byDarkwolf377 ( It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies.–C.S. Lewis)

This account has been banned or suspended.

I told you there wouldn’t be anybody left in the end except Jim Rob and his relatives, didn’t I?

Now, of course, Santorum has bubbled up from behind, and talks all that Gawd Talk.

Suddenly – the two bold red headers at the top of the index page are gone with the Cain Train.

I wonder if Jimbo is going to apologise to all the Santorum backers and reinstate their accounts?

The whole thing just smacks of somebody who’s watched too many sitcoms and thinks that shit’s actually hilarious in real life. As with every sitcom I try to watch (other than Raising Hope, which is fucking awesome) I am alternately bored and nauseous, listening to him.

I don’t know what’s creepier, the constant assertion that his family belongs to him (and it’s not that he says “my house,” it’s the defensive intonation), the way he’s unable to say “vagina” (like the word has cooties), the hooting laughter of the crowd, or the need for him to ply “his” wife with wine before she’ll even consider sex with him in the first place.

Given the choice between this douchebag and the Washington Redskins, I’d pick the Redskins too.

I spent my morning and afternoon dealing with the annual Wisconsin Newspaper Association convention in Madison. It was, of course, the only day it snowed in the past three weeks or so, which made for a hellish drive. I was meeting a group of newspaper kids there, who were apparently so concerned about my safety and my driving that they kept texting me every five minutes and demanding a response.

By the time I got there, I’d missed the keynote, which apparently was to say I saved an hour of sleep and prevented a brain aneurism. The guy noted that newspapers could be saved if they just acted more like Fox News.

Still, it was worth it. The kids got to meet folks from all around the state, rub elbows with some nice vendors and learn about various aspects of the business that go beyond our hinterland confines. They got a critique from one of the dudes associated with the state’s investigative journalism project and he was impressed with their work. They also picked up a couple awards, including one for being best overall in the state in the non-daily division.

(Side note: If you are at all interested in saving my soul, donate $7.50 to The Daily Cardinal Alumni Association, earmarking it for an entry into next year’s WNA Better Collegiate Newspaper Contest. The Badger Herald won everything, essentially by default, as the Cardinal is one of the only other dailies in the state. If I had to watch one more Hairball kid get an award simply for showing up, I might have regurgitated my lovely Lenten Friday veggie meal. Thanks.)

While picking through our lunch, a couple of the kids started talking about various things we’d done and the conversation wandered back to a national convention a few years back. It was the first one I’d done with this paper and for at least one kid, it was the first time she’d ever been on a plane or left the state.

They had a blast, got a good critique and really learned a ton. However, what they remember most is the Best of Show competition.

Prior to the convention, a few editors asked how people win the Best of Show at these things. I told them that they’d have to do an awesome job on a big issue. They’d have to pour in a ton of content, great visuals and really give people something amazing. They told me they wanted to give it a shot, so I broke the bank to add pages, pour color all over this thing and then produce a mega-issue. It took a ton of time, had a ton of problems and ended up being amazing, despite a few flaws. As Johnny Sain used to say, “No one wants to hear about the labor pains. They only want to see the baby.”

We entered the issue in the contest and found out that there were more than 300 entries overall, with a great many of them being in our sub-category. I also found out from the guy who was running the place that they would do the Top 10 in order to give people a fighting chance at some glory.

Eighth, I told myself. If we finish eighth, that would be amazing. It’s good enough to say we won something and yet not perfect, so we’ve got something to aim for next time. Eighth would work. Eighth would be awesome.

On the day of the award ceremony, the kids gathered for the event. One girl was so sick, she was bundled up in her winter wear, despite the sweltering temperatures in the ballroom. When I told her to go back to the room and get some rest, she refused: “I need to know if we won,” she rasped in between shudders and coughs.

I’m sure it was only about 20 minutes, but it seemed to take forever for them to get to our category. The awards were handed out from 10 to 1. When it hit eight and we weren’t announced, I was concerned. When I heard who did win eighth, I figured we were dead. Good paper, great adviser, long track record of winning stuff.

As they kept ticking off the winners and we kept not being announced, I started trying to figure out how to explain the outcome to the kids. Judging is random, your effort was good, the competition was tough… The statements I planned to use to soften the blow kept pouring into my brain.

After they announced the second-place paper, they looked at me with these terrified and yet hopeful eyes. It was like they wanted to believe it was their award and yet they knew it probably wasn’t.

I broke the tension as best I could.

“Well,” I told them, “this is going to go one of two ways for us…”

After more build up than is present in your average porn film, the MC announced the winner.

It was our paper.

The girls screamed and one of them just broke down sobbing. The sick kid was jumping up and down. They hugged each other and then poured on top of me with hugs. The editor, the only guy in the bunch, just sat there stunned. I told him to go get the award. He stayed put. I poked him. He wouldn’t move.

I finally said to him, “Get up there and get the goddamned thing before they think better of it and take it back!”

He ran up and grabbed the trophy. Everyone else got certificates. We got a golden cup. Oddly enough, I was thinking how great it would be to win a certificate because we could mount it on the wall. Where the hell would we put a cup?

We all ran out of the ballroom and started texting everyone back home. I’m sure we trended on Twitter for about three minutes.

We decided to get some lunch. The trophy came with us.

During lunch at a local Panera, the kids were arguing about whose suitcase would carry home the trophy. After a long debate, they gave it to one girl who had a hard plastic suitcase and usually dressed in sweat shirts. The clothing, they argued, would provide padding while the suitcase itself offered protection from the elements.

I built a shelf in the newsroom and the cup sits there, coming down for an occasional dusting and a fairly frequent “cuddle session” with one of the editors.

As the editors retold this story to the newer staffers today, they were still smiling. And then, the girl who got to carry the trophy home offered this:

“I think that will be the most memorable moment of my life, up until my wedding day.”

The girl who was sick on that trip responded, “Nah. It’ll be even better than my wedding.”

I can’t say that it will or won’t be better than their weddings, nor can I state that it was better than mine. (I think the Missus might kill me…) I don’t know if we’ll ever win something that will be better than that. Sure, best in state is great and I’m sure a best in the country would be amazing too.

However, this was the first one. It was that moment where they put themselves out there for the first time. They had no right to expect to win. The odds were so much against them.

They’d been told they attended a branch school, a weaker sister of a bigger campus. They were told they lacked the education, the experience, the talent of bigger papers throughout the country. They didn’t have the pedigree for this kind of thing.

Yet, they stood up and said, “This is who we are. This is what we do. Take it for what it’s worth.”

For that, they were rewarded with something that went far beyond a golden cup.

Oscar used to be a mild mannered pussy cat. But the older he gets, the more cattitude he has. This is Oscar glaring at our friend Wendy aka Elspeth Ravenwind as she took his picture instead of petting him. The nerve:

Teachers at a Des Plaines high school want students to leave some room for the holy spirit. They’ve instituted a policy at Maine West High School dances to keep students from getting a little too dirty with their dancing.

The school requires all dance-goers to wear a wristband. If they are caught “dancing in a way that simulates a sexual act” the wristband is removed. If they’re caught doing it again after that, they’ll be sent home.

“We’re certainly not the only school in the country dealing with this issue. It seems to be becoming more mainstream and more the norm…and it certainly is not,” Assistant Principal Dave Berendt said of inappropriate dancing. “If we continue to turn a blind eye to it, we’re just condoning the behavior.”

I guess a suburban school principal wouldn’t stay in his job very long if he said something along the lines of:

“Look, your kids are fucking. Theyr’e fucking in the stairwell when they think the security cameras won’t pick them up, they’re fucking in your SUV when they’ve told you they’re going to the movies, they’re fucking at friends’ houses, they’re fucking underneath their Hello Kitty sheets when you’re on vacation, they’re fucking with or without your approval, they’re fucking all the time, and when they’re not fucking, they are either talking or thinking about fucking, because that’s what people that age do. Technically it’s what people of any age do, at least if they’re still trying to be human goddamn beings.

“Remember being that age? Remember that? It was like being a rabid squirrel nailed inside a paint can all the time. You were just banging around in there, all hopped up on your own adolescent energy and ambition, and only something as powerful as your very first orgasm with another human being seemed amazing enough to match the glory inside you. I know you fucking office park busybodies spend all goddamn day now actively pretending you were never like that (because then you’d have to question why you’re not like that now, and no, simple age didn’t make you a pussy, try again), but you were. Parents of kids in high school right now? Chances are you were backing it up against some be-bodysuited hottie while Salt-n-Pepa’s “Shoop” rocked the house party, and that’s how you GOT a high school-age kid in the first place. If nobody gave you any static about it then, what is your fucking problem?

“Yeah, yeah, you’re older and smarter now and you wish you hadn’t given chlamydia to half the football team. I get it. Guess what? That’s the world. You want to deaden your own nerve endings and forget who you used to be so you won’t have to think about who you are? Fine. But stop loading all that shit onto teenage girls and boys who haven’t done anything to deserve it but get up in the morning. Stop projecting your mistakes and how you’ve dealt with them (and by the by, have you ever heard of condoms, they’ve been around for like five hundred years) onto kids you don’t know and don’t care to know. It is not their responsibility to carry your feelings. That’s not their problem.

“I would not be a teenager right now if you put a gun to my head. If you put the cold metal barrel of a pistol to my temple and said I am regressing you to age 13 and making you do this all over again now, I would reach around you and pull the trigger myself. First of all, even if you’re lucky enough to have normal parents a double-digit percentage of them today are batshit insane and their insane kids are in class too. Second of all, they’re growing up in a culture obsessed with the end of the world, where every book and movie is about how we’re all going to die, so that’s soothing. And third, every time they turn on the TV or open a laptop, there’s some wadded-panty scold in front of them complaining about how their musical taste is invalid and nobody’s as good as old people were and the job market is hopeless but even if it wasn’t, their entire generation is lazy and entitled and hateful and stupid. And not one of these assholes has done anything more to get to know a teenager than ring up one’s purchase of Red Bull at a fucking Safeway.

“Speaking of the culture, the fucking earth is indeed caving in. There are schools within a bike ride of here that have kids whose lives make yours look like goddamn paradise. There are people lining up at food pantries whose kids you walk by the in hall every day. Our politics is about to criminalize being girls, we’re still at war even though we’re pretending we’re not anymore, and in an hour’s drive you can be in a neighborhood that looks like something out of Blade Runner. You want to talk about morality? Let’s talk about the morality of having a full metal freakout over kids touching each other to songs about ‘booty’ while all of THAT is going on. What on earth are we teaching teenagers when we teach them that?

“I’ll tell you what we’re teaching them: That there’s nothing on this earth so evil as kids having sex. That it doesn’t matter one bit what goes on in the world, or how it affects them, or what they think about it or what they could do. That what should get them riled the fuck up is two relatively well-off young people treating one another with physical affection. If this was a sensible discussion about rape culture that would be one thing. This is an “all sexualized behavior is horrible and must be stamped out” discussion. You’re teaching them that that’s the be-all and end-all of their existence, and by the way, way to not make them neurotic about sex or anything by talking about it all the time in dated terms, Mom.

“They’re going to grow up in that toxic mental petri dish and some of them will be okay anyway because they’re awesome, but some of them will turn into the kinds of parents and teachers who flip the fuck out every time some kid puts his or her hands on another kid’s ass to a song. And won’t that be fun for the next person in my job. Won’t that be a good time we’ve never seen before.”

Another Republiclown debate last night, they say the last one this cycle. God, what a ‘choice.’ Batchelor Number One — Boring! Batchelor Number Two — Cheating! Batchelor Number Three — Methuselah! And Batchelor Number Four —Santorum.